Will they continue in a loop until told otherwise ?

No, sorry that wasn’t the intention of the gif. They will just go to each waypoint in order.

Adding patrols would be cool though, I’ll have a look at adding them in a future update.

Yup, walking up and down a wall, repairing and defending.

I know this is getting complicated, but having some way to set how long they wait at a given waypoint could be handy.

I know this is getting complicated, but having some way to set how long they wait at a given waypoint could be handy.

There's a way. You can spam some points so that they walk back and forth in some small-ish circle to delay it from walking away too quickly. It doesn't stop completely, but it stays within the circle you set and the distance and amount of points translates to time stayed. So it's a workaround but enough in some situations.

EDIT: Not true as of 1.1
Yes, it only checks every 10 ticks to see if it has completed its journey, so every click in the same space will make it stay for 1/6 of a second. I’ll do patrols first because I think that it would be easier to implement and more useful.

I’m thinking: have a shortcut button that enables ‘patrol mode’. When activated, you can click to place waypoints but the Spidertron will not start moving. When you click within a few tiles of ‘1’, it will merge those 2 and become a loop. At that point the Spidertron will start moving around the loop.

Apparently you can click and drag to create a lot of waypoints! I don't know how to disable that so I guess that its a feature now :P

There also appears to be a slight bug where it clears all the waypoints when it gets to some that are too close together. I'm really waiting on https://forums.factorio.com/viewtopic.php?f=65&t=88668 for that bit of code. The current version is a bit hacked together in on_nth_tick to check if it is near its autopilot_destination.

Seems the event will be coming out with the next release when ever that occurs.

Yep. I'm not optimistic about it coming soon though.

+1 for the patrol. With shift click if possible.
For instance, you hold shift to add one way paths, like they already work. For loops, you hold ctrl and than click in the point A, B, C, D, E and when you release CTRL it finish the path (or press other key if holding it is to annoying)
So in the code, whenever you have a loop path at the end, you use the same move command from E to A or the last point to the first

Unfortunately due to limitations of the API, those controls aren't possible. You can't apply modifiers to the 'remote' action and get its position at the same time. So currently, I use shift-click to clear all waypoints, and that is set to only take effect when a remote is in the player's hand, but it can't do something with the position of the remote. I can also modify the effect of the remote, but that will only be triggered during a non-modified click.

I've had some ideas for alternate input schemes though.

I've just released 1.1 with the patrol feature. I'm quite happy with the interface method (shift-scroll), but let me know if you've got further suggestions :)

shift scroll works a little oddly on a thinkpad trackpoint keyboard, the scroll is a little fast and it's almost chance that I scroll to the patrol remote but quite useable. my biggest issue with it is when switching between patrol remote and regular remote is the remote gets removed from the quickbar.

I can't scroll, my scroll wheel is broken. And there's no keybind for patrol remote. :(

You can actually rebind "Blueprint book next" and "Blueprint book previous" to any keys you like to avoid having to scroll :)
I'll add it to the readme.

I did that a long time ago. Yeah you should tell us that is the keybind used :o

Holly fu#@ man, thanks! I didn't tested yet but thanks in advanced!

With 1.2, you all should find the controls much more usable. Thanks for the feedback!